Digg is a community-oriented website that puts an emphasis on technology and science related articles. Recently Digg made an expansion and began to cater to a much wider range of categories, including entertainment, politics and health just to name a few. What makes Digg just a powerful force online is that the service is the result of combining syndication, blogging and social bookmarking with complete democratic editorial control that allows the community to collectively judge and filter information based on relevance and usefulness. While many other news websites employ a hierarchical editorial system, all users on the Digg social media website have equal power in the submission and voting processes.

How Digg Works

     How is this accomplished? Every piece of content on the Digg website, including news, videos, images and podcasts, is submitted by members of the Digg community. Once something has been submitted to Digg, other people can begin to see it. The Digg community is encouraged to 'Digg' what they like best. When a submission receives a high enough number of 'Diggs', it will be promoted to the front page of the website where millions of visitors will see it.

     The Digg news community is all about community sharing and discovery, so there is more to the process than simply submitting and voting. There is a conversation that occurs all around the content, in the form of commenting and discussion. The faces behind Digg promote this growing conversation by providing tools to the community that allow them to better communicate with one another.

     Digg is democratizing the Internet when it comes to digital media, by allowing users to participate in the process of discovery, sharing, voting on and discussing news articles, videos, images and podcasts. As a Digg user, you are responsible for determining what website content is shown and what is not, alongside the rest of a fast growing community. The process behind submitting and voting on Digg is actually quite simple and straightforward.

     Step 1: Discover – The first step in the Digging process is to submit your favorite news and media content. Find an article, an image, a video or a podcast online that you believe is worth sharing, and submit it to Digg.com to see what the rest of the community thinks. Your submission will immediately appear in the "Upcoming Stories" area, where other members of the website will be able to find it. If they like what you posted, or feel that it is worth sharing further, they will 'Digg' it.

     Once a submission has earned enough Diggs, it becomes regarded as "popular" and will jump to the main home page for the category that it was posted in. If it becomes one of the most popular content pieces on the website, it will qualify as a "Top 10". If a submission does not manage to receive enough Diggs from community members within a specific amount of time on the other hand, it will eventually fall out of the "Upcoming" section of the website, making it more difficult for the rest of the community to see it.

     You can visit the 'Upcoming' section of the Digg website to discover news, videos, images and podcasts that were recently submitted by other Digg users. You can track submissions as they enter the website using Swarm, Stack and Big Spy. Checking out the home page for each category or topic is another way to discover what is becoming popular. Finally, you can subscribe to RSS or Really Simple Syndication feeds for particular categories and topics, as well as individual users, popular and upcoming sections and specific search terms of your choosing if you want to track specific submissions or categories in order to discover new content.

     Step 2: Select – Now is your chance to participate in the collaboration-based editorial process by Digging the content that you like best. Every piece of content that is submitted to the Digg website is given a tracker, collecting votes from users. As you Digg, you are contributing to the popularity of the items that you vote on. You can also build up your personal history of Digging so that your friends can view what you have been looking at.

     On the other hand, if you come across news stories, articles or other content that is off-topic, duplicated or has bad links, you should click on 'Bury' instead of Digg. Because Digg has no editors other than the users on the website, the only way to get the spam out of the system is to give users a chance to bury bad content. This is the best way to ensure that the good content is constantly rising to the top.

     The Digg and Bury system only works the way its meant to when users are actively participating on a very large scale. Do your part to keep the system running smoothly by Digging the content that truly matters, and burying the content that is out of place or that simply does not belong.

     Step 3: Share – Now your job as a Digg user is to build a network. You can accomplish this by inviting your friends over, or locating their Digg profiles and adding them to your list of friends. Your friends can keep track of everything that you are Digging, and you can check out what they have had their eyes on too. Together, you and your friends can create a network by collectively discovering and Digging news and other media together.

     If your friends, family and colleagues have not already joined Digg, you can still share with them all of the articles, stories and media that you are Digging by sending e-mail messages to them. You can use the Email function to contact both Diggers and Non-Diggers alike.

     Step 4: Discuss – While the main component of the Digg community is to Digg and Bury news stories, articles and other media, there is much more to the community than simply flagging the content that you discover. There is also a large discussion component that is growing every day on Digg.com. You can share your opinions by leaving comments on all of the news, stories, videos, images and podcasts that you come across. You also have the power to Digg and Bury the comments that are left on media by other users of the website. The discussion component of Digg is an exciting way to network and communicate with other users on the site, and will open up new avenues for discovering additional content to rate within the community.

The History of Digg

     Digg was originally created as a social networking experiment by a group of four men in late 2004. All four developers, Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky and Jay Adelson play an active role in the management of the Digg website even today. According to Kevin Rose, the idea had been played with for a number of months prior to the point where they decided to develop the beta version of the Digg website. Website development began in October of 2004, and the Digg social media experiment was officially launched to the entire world on December 5 of that same year.

     David Prager of The Screen Savers and This Week in Tech, who is a friend to Kevin Rose, originally wanted to call the website 'Diggnation', but Rose was looking for a much more simple name. The name 'Digg' was chosen as a reference to the ability of users to "dig" stories out of the submission pile in order to give them a place on the front page. Because Dig.com had already been registered, the second 'g' was added and Digg.com was born. David Prager's idea for Diggnation was eventually used, as this is the name of the weekly podcast that is released by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.

     The original website design was completely clear of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Ries. Following Digg's popularity, the faces behind the website decided to add Google Ad Sense. By July of 2005, the Digg.com website had reached Version 2.0, which featured a variety of changes and updates for better usability. The newer version of the Digg.com website featured the ability to add and track friends, and the ability to "digg" stories without having to be redirected to a different web page.

     According to website developers, the future versions of the Digg.com website will feature a design that is much more minimalist in nature. Version 3.0 of Digg was released in June of 2006 with specific categories for Technology, World and Business, Science, Entertainment, Gaming and Videos, as well as a 'View All' category that merges all of the other categories together. The interface of the Digg.com website was altered again in August of 2007, each incarnation sporting a better looking design and a more user-friendly functionality.

Features, Functionality and New Services on Digg

     Readers on the Digg.com website can view everything that has been submitted by other users, using the 'Upcoming' section of the website. Once enough digg votes are cast for a particular story, it will appear on the front page of the website. All of the content on the Digg website is completely free, but registration is a requirement in order to participate by promoting and submitting stories, and participating in discussions.

     The original incarnation of the Digg website hosted a variety of different categories, but the 3.0 version of the website fit a long list of categories into only six containers with sub-categories built in. Although the original intention of Digg seemed to be to cater specifically to science and technology news and media, the social news networking website now also caters to sports, entertainment and gaming news, as well as a constantly growing list of categories and sub topics.

     Digg.com allows for several different ways to sort through stories and to find the stories that you are looking for. Not only can you separate submissions by media type (news, video, podcast, image), but also you can further separate stories based on the category that they fit into. There is also a category for miscellaneous stories, known as 'Offbeat'. Users looking for new stories should visit the 'Upcoming' section of the Digg.com website to see what stories have been recently submitted and are looking for Diggs.

     The number of features being offered by Digg is growing at a consistent rate. Digg offers a variety of buttons, images and links that you can post in your blog entries and website content in order to convince others to submit your media to Digg, or to vote on it once it has been submitted. Digg also has a fun application that allows you to post relevant Digg news on your own website, much in the same way that you can post relevant ads on your website through Google Ad Sense. Digg also offers the Digg API, which presents a way for users to develop their own nifty Digg tools.

     Digg is gaining popularity more quickly than imagined, and for good reason if you consider everything that the social networking experiment has to offer. Digg allows users to discover and share news, and to discuss stories with other users all over the world, creating an extremely productive news community created by the users and the news that fills Digg.com's pages.

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